Just as the Prometheus Awards overlaps to some extent with the Hugo and Nebula wards in terms of the works and writers recognized, our list of Prometheus-winning writers overlaps with the Forry Awards.
C.J. Cherryh, who co-wrote the 2020 Prometheus Best Novel winner (Alliance Rising) with her partner Jane S. Fancher, is the 13th Prometheus winner to also be recognized in the Forry awards.
Cherryh recently won the 2025 Forrest J Ackerman Award for Lifetime Achievement given by the members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. (See our previous post about Cherryh’s latest honor.)
It’s interesting to see what writers have been recognized by both the LASFS, the world’s oldest continuously active science fiction and fantasy club, and the Libertarian Futurist Society (LFS), established in 1982 to sustain the Prometheus Awards.
Such broad cross-recognition should be another reminder of just how embedded libertarian and anti-authoritarian ideas and values are within our popular culture – and have been, for generations, even amid various socio-economic developments and political trends, both positive and negative.
So if Cherryh is the 13th Prometheus winner to be recognized with a Forry award, who else is on that illustrious cross-checked list?
OTHER FORRY WINNERS
Among the 57 individuals, writers, editors, artists, fans, film creators and composers who “have been included in this recognition of a lifetime’s worth of presenting the best of our genre to the world” are such Prometheus-winning favorites as Poul Anderson and Robert Heinlein, both of whom won multiple Prometheus Awards.
Both have won quite a few Prometheus Awards – and more than any other writers.
Anderson (1926-2001) has won seven so far, most recently in 2025 for his novel Orion Shall Rise, inducted in 2015 into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
Anderson was the first sf/fantasy author to receive the LFS’s Special Prometheus Award for Lifetime Achievement. His wife Karen Anderson – also on the list of Forry Award recipients – accepted the ailing Anderson’s Special Award in 2001 at the first LFScon at Marcon in Columbus, Ohio.
Robert Heinlein (1907-1988) is only individual to win more Prometheus Awards. He holds the all-time record with nine awards.
Largely because Heinlein died in 1988, more than a decade before the establishment of the Prometheus Awards in 1979, and most of his novels were published during his lifetime, all of his LFS recognition has come via the Prometheus Hall of Fame.
Heinlein was one of the first two Hall of Fame winners in 1983 for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and also was recognized just a few years later for Strangers in a Strange Land. Still a favorite among LFS members, Heinlein most recently was recognized in 2022 for Citizen of the Galaxy and in 2023 for his story “Free Men.”
Other Forry Award winners who’ve won more than one Prometheus Award include Jerry Pournelle (for Fallen Angels and The Survival of Freedom) and Terry Pratchett (for his Discworld novels Night Watch and The Truth, inducted in 2024 into our Hall of Fame.)
Other Prometheus-winning authors who’ve won a Forry Award include Ray Bradbury (a Hall of Fame winner for Fahrenheit 451), Lois McMaster Bujold (Falling Free), and Harlan Ellision (“‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”).
Also: Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed), Larry Niven (Fallen Angels, co-written with Pournelle and Michael Flynn), Harry Turtledove (The Gladiator), A.E. Van Vogt (The Weapon Shops of Isher) and Jack Williamson (“With Folded Hands….”).
In addition, several other acclaimed SF/fantasy writers who’s won a Forry Award have been nominated for the Prometheus Award, including Isaac Asimov, Gregory Benford, David Brin, Spider Robinson, Robert Silverberg and Roger Zelazny.
Of those, Brin and Silverberg went on to be recognized as Prometheus finalists.
ABOUT THE LFS AND THE PROMETHEUS AWARDS
* Join us! To help sustain the Prometheus Awards and support a cultural and literary strategy to appreciate and honor freedom-loving fiction, join the Libertarian Futurist Society, a non-profit all-volunteer international association of freedom-loving sf/fantasy fans.
Libertarian futurists understand that culture matters. We believe that literature and the arts can be vital in envisioning a freer and better future. In some ways, culture can be even more influential and powerful than politics in the long run, by imagining better visions of the future incorporating peace, prosperity, progress, tolerance, justice, positive social change, and mutual respect for each other’s rights, human dignity, individuality and peaceful choices.
* Prometheus winners: For a full list of Prometheus winners, finalists and nominees – including in the annual Best Novel and Best Classic Fiction (Hall of Fame) categories and occasional Special Awards – visit the enhanced Prometheus Awards page on the LFS website. This page includes convenient links to all published essay-reviews in our Appreciation series explaining why each of more than 100 past winners since 1979 fits the awards’ distinctive dual focus on both quality and liberty.
* Watch videos of past Prometheus Awards ceremonies, Libertarian Futurist Society panel discussions with noted sf authors and leading libertarian writers, and other LFS programs on the Prometheus Blog’s Video page.
* Read “The Libertarian History of Science Fiction,” an essay in the international magazine Quillette that favorably highlights the Prometheus Awards, the Libertarian Futurist Society and the significant element of libertarian sf/fantasy in the evolution of the modern genre.
* Check out the Libertarian Futurist Society’s Facebook page for comments, updates and links to the latest Prometheus Blog posts.
